“Clark Rockefeller” Found Guilty: Mark Seal on the Murder Verdict—and What Became of the Victim’s Wife

When the imposter who masqueraded as Clark Rockefeller was found guilty of first-degree murder yesterday, I thought immediately of the victims. And not just of John Sohus, the 28-year-old computer programmer whose fractured skull and severed bones were found buried in a San Marino, California, backyard, encased in book bags from universities where the defendant had attended (or pretended to attend back in the 1980s). I thought of the endless victims of Clark Rockefeller’s lies.

They are a fraternity of sorts—a seemingly never-ending cadre of trusting believers who fell prey to a 30-year spree of outrageous deceptions. “He’s guilty!” exclaimed Jean Kelln, who, with her husband, Elmer, picked up the young man, born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, when he was 17, hitchhiking in the rain one day near his home in Bergen, Germany, where the Kellns were on vacation. He used their name and address on his visa, without their knowledge or permission, then abused their trust and friendship in various ways throughout his stay in California. “I was in tears, to know that they convicted him and he will be off the streets,” said Jean, a big-hearted woman who plays the piano to entertain patients at a local hospital. “He has told so many lies and hurt so many people by his behavior and lies. Even before considering a murder, he has done damage to many.”

I thought of the string of victims across America, many of whom testified about the diminutive man who told the big lies, as the defendant sat smug and silent throughout the trial. In a blue blazer and white shirt, detached, aloof, he listened as witnesses recounted his elaborate deceptions: his claims of being related to Lord Mountbatten, the Queen, and other members of Britain’s royalty; his role as the producer of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents; his unpaid jobs as a member of super-secret, high-level government organizations; his masterminding of a critically important company called Jet Propulsion Laboratories; his position as an operative for the C.I.A., one who expected to be appointed to the Federal Reserve Board; and his status as one of the world’s most important contemporary-art collectors, whose billion-dollar collection turned out to be as phony as he was.

Most of all, I thought of the women the defendant had duped: a string of friends, girlfriends, and, in two cases, wives who gave him American citizenship, food, money, shelter, and, in some cases, love. I thought of Elaine Siskoff, an early girlfriend, who testified that when the defendant lived in Wisconsin in the early 1980s, she introduced him to her sister, whom he convinced to marry him for a green card. He left for California, Elaine Siskoff testified, where he said he’d landed an internship with Star Wars director George Lucas. I thought of the drunken and lonely Didi Sohus, who gave the young man posing as Christopher Chichester—the “18th Baronet of Chichester,” a bogus title he had emblazoned on calling cards—access to her San Marino, California, garage apartment, rent-free. Later, according to the lead detective in the case, he conspired to steal her estate, exile her to a trailer park with two strangers with whom he’d conspired to split the proceeds of Didi’s estate, and, according to the jury, murder her beloved only son.

From the moment Chichester left San Marino in the missing couple’s truck, he began a 30-year journey of assuming fake identities across America. He was Christopher Chichester Crowe, computer programmer at the prestigious S.N. Phelps and Co. investment firm in Greenwich, Connecticut; Christopher Crowe, corporate bond salesman, who actually ran a trading department on Wall Street; and finally Clark Rockefeller, scion of the famous family.

“He said he refused to set foot on the soil of Connecticut because it was an evil state, and that’s where his parents died,” testified his ex-wife of 12 years, Sandra Boss—not even for a bathroom break. Public toilets, he sniffed to Boss at the time, were beneath him. In actuality, police had once been searching for “Rockefeller” in the state regarding the missing John and Linda Sohus, after he had tried to sell their stolen truck in the state.

I thought of Mihoko Manabe, the Japanese American natural-gas expert, who met “Rockefeller” when he was posing as bond trader Christopher Crowe. They worked together on Wall Street, living together as lovers in New York City. She testified that she remained “loyal” to him, even when the police came calling. Because she believed she was in love, she said she followed her boyfriend’s instructions to help him dye his hair blond, shred their papers and trash, move their mailing address to a Pennsylvania post-office box, walk on separate sides of the street, and go into “hiding.”

Most of all, after the verdict, I thought of Boss, who had retained an abiding sense of faith in her husband, even as he never worked and had only one source of funding, as she put it: “mine.” During her composed and sometimes defiant testimony in Los Angeles, she did her best not to glance at Gerhartsreiter, who accepted $800,000 in a divorce settlement only to kidnap their then seven-year-old daughter, “Snooks,” off a Boston street, causing his string of assumed identities to be exposed. (His plan included whisking her off to Baltimore, where he had set up a new life as “Chip Smith,” high-seas ship captain.) “You left your picture here,” Boss told the prosecutor, when he left a picture of the couple on their wedding day on the witness stand. “I don’t want to keep looking at that.”

In his closing arguments, the prosecutor told jurors that this wasn’t “a movie, a book, a TV show, a docudrama. This case is about two people who lived and died.” And after sitting through three weeks of testimony, with 40 witnesses and 160 exhibits, the six-woman, six-man jury found the defendant guilty after only six hours of deliberation. After the verdict, the prosecutor, assistant D.A. Herb Balian, told the media that the jury could have been the con man’s ultimate dupes. “His last con,” he said, had they believed the defense’s story that it had been John’s wife, Linda, who’d swung the blunt object into her husband’s skull, stabbed him six times, and buried him behind his mother’s house.

Gerhartsreiter spent the trial days taking copious notes, but he remained silent, even as he rose to hear the guilty verdict. The mystery man has finally been unmasked, but, like the Hitchcock films he loved so much, the mystery itself endures: what happened to John Sohus’s wife, Linda, who, after 30 years, remains missing? “So glad that poor John has gotten justice,” Linda’s friend Sue Coffman, who doggedly fought to find her missing friend through TV shows and police inquiries, wrote to me in an e-mail. “It is so unfortunate that we shall never know what happened to Linda, but I am considering her dead as well, and paired with her husband for eternity.”

One juror told the media that he would suggest a lighter sentence if the defendant would lead authorities to Linda Sohus, which seems unlikely; among other things, it would mean that the imposter would have to break his silence and come clean. In the meantime, Gerhartsreiter will serve 27 years to life in federal prison, after his sentencing is handed down on June 26. And until then, he’ll receive what he always loved most: attention—though not, to his chagrin, as a Rockefeller.